Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Max) to 25h (13 Pro Max)

Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by dougmwne on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:33PM (#28557159)

I think it is about half due to variable refresh rate and less than half due to hardware efficiency improvements, and maybe 10% due to a larger battery. The 12 and 12 Pro got 11 hours of streaming playback, the 13 gets 15 hours with it's larger battery and more efficient hardware, while the 13 Pro gets 20 hours with it's variable refresh rate.

It appears that the battery on the 13 and 13 Pro are close in size since they both get 75 hours of music playback. The battery is slightly larger on the 13 than the 12 which got 65 hours of music. (I assume hardware efficiency would have very little effect on AAC decoding at this point, there couldn't have been much left to optimize.)

So all in all, looks like variable refresh will be a potentially very impressive feature, both for smoother UI and better battery life.

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by BugsJustFindMe on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:40PM (#28558034)

> So all in all, looks like variable refresh will be a potentially very impressive feature, both for smoother UI and better battery life.

And I think coming soon to macOS Monterey too. If we thought the M1 MBPs had impressive battery life at launch...

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by cr__ on Thursday September 16, 2021 @06:21PM (#28558505)

I think you’re thinking of “adaptive sync”, which is more of a gaming thing and only works when the app is fullscreened.

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by BugsJustFindMe on Thursday September 16, 2021 @06:33PM (#28558657)

> I think you’re thinking of “adaptive sync”

Adaptive sync and variable refresh rate are the same thing.

> only works when the app is fullscreened

Video of the monterey beta shows it works without being fullscreened. https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/o1954n/adaptive_...

I don't know to what extent the display itself needs to be different, but hopefully Apple planned ahead.

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by y4mi on Friday September 17, 2021 @06:57AM (#28563813)

> Video of the monterey beta shows it works without being fullscreened.

That is so confusing. Doesn't that mean you could create a malicious video which basically freezes the display for multiple seconds?

And wouldn't your interface feel super laggy if it's reduced to something like 30fps? That's what most content is produced with, right?

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by BugsJustFindMe on Friday September 17, 2021 @08:45AM (#28564788)

Doing other stuff with the system likely preempts the slowdown. Someone in another thread reported that just moving their mouse increased refresh rate.

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by sk0g on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:10AM (#28561448)

I can't see it as an option for my MBP, though I do have the monitor connected in a roundabout way, through a dock. Monitor did support FreeSync, which is the open one too, so wondering what's going on there. Monterey Beta 6 here (along with all the pains that that version brought).

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Re:Video streaming battery life improved from 12h (12 Pro Ma... by andy_ppp on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:40PM (#28558035)

We can roughly calculate the expected improvement based on “non-streaming” factors (8h extra/28h*25h=7.14h of expected improvements that include things like screen refresh rate, decoding and better battery) so therefore 25h new streaming video, minus 12h previous streaming battery, minus 7h expected improvement leaves about 5 hours of streaming performance improvements (WiFi/Network/bug fixes/???). Seems like a lot.

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